San Diego residents get rare bit of good news: Charger will stay in town for net season

Sunday

Jan 31, 2016 at 11:10 AMJan 31, 2016 at 11:32 AM

San Diego woke up Saturday morning with the Chargers still here, at least for one more season.

San Diego woke up Saturday morning with the Chargers still here, at least for one more season.

Team owner Dean Spanos announced Friday afternoon that while he’s reached an agreement that would enable him eventually to join the Rams in Inglewood and tap into the greener financial pastures of the nation’s second-largest media market, he’ll renew negotiations with local government officials on building a new stadium here.

"This has been our home for 55 years," he said in the note addressed to Chargers fans, "and I want to keep the team here and provide the world-class stadium experience you deserve."

The announcement was greeted mostly with optimism from elected officials, sighs of relief from longtime backers of the NFL team, and caution if not skepticism from others weary of stadium machinations that have been going on for almost 15 years.

Now comes the hard part: working out an agreement on where a new stadium will be built and how it will be funded, and then getting approval from voters.

"I’m just as confused as I was a few months back," said Tommie Vaughn, a longtime fan who runs a Chargers website (chargertom.com) from his Escondido home. "It’s like going into marriage counseling where everybody says all these nasty things about each other, and then they try to work it out, but you have to wonder if at some point too much damage has been done."

If nothing else, Friday’s news inserts a breather and a new tone of cooperation into what has been months of tense backstage maneuvering and public finger pointing over the fate of the team, which has been here since 1961 and is, to many people, as much a part of the community fabric as beaches and fish tacos.

Spanos said in his statement that he had met with Mayor Kevin Faulconer and county Supervisor Ron Roberts "and I look forward to working closely with them and the business community to resolve our stadium dilemma. I am committed to looking at this with a fresh perspective and new sense of possibility."

The elected officials responded with their own statement. "We appreciate Mr. Spanos’ commitment to staying in San Diego for the 2016 season to work with the region on a stadium solution. We look forward to discussing his vision for a new San Diego home for the Chargers, and will be working with him and our negotiating team on a fair and viable plan to put before voters. We have agreed to meet again in the near future."

Neither statement said whether the revived stadium negotiations would focus on Mission Valley, downtown, or both.

Wheels in motion

While publicly pursuing plans for a shared stadium in Carson with the Oakland Raiders — a plan rejected by NFL owners on Jan. 12 when they approved the Inglewood proposal by the Rams — the Chargers have also been getting ready for another local push for months. They have done preliminary work on a ballot initiative that will almost certainly be aimed at getting a stadium built downtown.

The initiative would likely need to be launched by late March in order to qualify for the November ballot. Signatures must be gathered from nearly 67,000 registered voters under city rules, but that number would drop to 19,000 with City Council approval of the measure.

Roberts said they discussed a downtown stadium with Spanos when they met Friday afternoon, "and while it remains on the table, it’s not being pushed as the only place or the right place."

The team owner, he added, seemed open to a stadium built on the existing Qualcomm site. Local officials have proposed a $1.1 billion project there that would include $200 million from the city and $150 million from the county. The plan also calls for a $200 million loan from the NFL, $362.5 million from the Chargers and $187.5 million from seat licenses. Since it was proposed, the league has offered an additional $100 million for a new stadium somewhere in San Diego, so those numbers could change.

Roberts said Friday’s meeting had an "incredibly positive tenor" and he expressed optimism a deal can be struck. "It was three people getting together and agreeing to get this done," he said.

The reaction from longtime fans, meanwhile, was mixed.

"I’m excited," said Michelle Gable, an accountant and novelist. "I’ve been tweeting about it all afternoon."

Gable’s family connection to the team dates back to her grandmother, who had season tickets at Balboa Stadium in the 1960s. Gable’s father, Tom, became a journalist because of a family friendship with Jack Murphy, the local sportswriter whose name used to be on Qualcomm Stadium.

As a season ticket holder, she got an email from Spanos Friday afternoon with the latest development. She said she liked what it said. "It sounds like the Chargers are genuinely going to try to make it work."

Vaughn, the website operator, said he was moved by the Spanos statement, too.

"The most encouraging thing to me was that for the first time he acknowledged the fans," Vaughn said. "Until this point, it just felt like we were a byproduct. I think that was a big step for him."

Still, he’s not sure what to think. "My fear is that it’s just going to be more of the same game from both sides, the politicians and the businessmen," he said.

Tom Whiting, who has had season tickets since the 1960s and sometimes travels to watch the team on the road, said even with Friday’s announcement, "I think I’m done." Pointing to the option the team has in place to join the Rams and to the plans submitted in Santa Ana for a new headquarters and training facility, he said, "They intend to leave, so why should I bother?"

Whiting has six season tickets. He’s the the kind of fan who went to Washington, D.C., one year to watch San Diego play the Redskins and made arrangements at Arlington National Cemetery to place a wreath of flowers done up in Chargers’ blue and gold at the Tomb of the Unknowns.

"It will be hard to part ways with something that’s meant so much to us, but it’s not like the team is on the come and going to win the Super Bowl," he said. "I have a 65-inch TV. I’ll be fine."

Deadlines

NFL owners voted Jan. 12 to allow the Rams to move to Los Angeles and gave the Chargers the option to join them. Officials from the two franchises began meeting and focused on a deal brokered by the NFL in which the Chargers would be a revenue-sharing tenant in the Inglewood stadium, which is set to open in 2019 and would be the league’s largest.

An agreement in principle was reached Friday morning. The Chargers would pay $1 per year in rent and contribute their $200 million NFL loan and seat-license fees toward the cost of construction.

The Chargers have until Jan. 15, 2017, to exercise their option to move. If they get a stadium initiative approved this year, that deadline could be extended to 2018 to allow for legal challenges or a second election. If the Chargers ultimately pass on Inglewood, the NFL has given the Raiders the option of joining the Rams there.

"We are very supportive of the decision by Dean Spanos to continue his efforts in San Diego and work with local leaders to develop a permanent stadium solution," NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement.

With an Inglewood option in his pocket, Spanos would seem to have leverage in the upcoming negotiations. Moving to L.A., by most estimates, would increase the value of the franchise substantially. But it also comes with steep costs — $550 million to the NFL for relocating. And the Chargers don’t have anywhere near the same fan following there as the Rams, who played in the region for almost 50 years before moving to St. Louis in 1995.

In an interview posted on the Chargers’ website Friday, Spanos said his family met over the past three days and decided unanimously to work on a stadium deal in San Diego.

"I wish I could undo the last year, change it, wave a magic wand and made it play out differently," he said. "At the end of the day, we wanted to create some options for ourselves. It was a difficult thing for everybody, especially the fans. But we are where we are, and we’re going to move forward."

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